Indoor cats, and the savage.

Christmas alone in a Yarramalong rainforest. ABS off, elephant turns badly, and the soma of comfort versus the meaning of suffering.

The driveway down to Bunyip is steep enough that the front brake light stays on the whole way down, and the rear brake gets feathered in pulses, and the ABS is off because ABS on a gradient like this would freeze the wheel and send the bike into the ferns. It is signposted 4WD-only, which on a Himalayan with road-biased dirt tyres is a euphemism. The Hipcamp at the bottom is tucked into rainforest in Yarramalong — the so-called ‘forgotten valley’ an hour and a half north of Sydney — and I have it to myself, on Christmas Eve, by choice.

The shelter is half indoors and half not. A timber deck under a pitched roof, open-sided to the bush, with a rainwater shower on a pole and a long-drop toilet up the slope. The nearest other person is several kilometres of single-lane gravel away. On the tank bag is a paperback copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I had picked up in a second-hand shop in Lithgow because the cover was cheap and the timing was deliberate.

Huxley’s frame is the one I want to test against the night. On one side the inhabitants of the World State, dosed on soma and engineered serenity, conditioned from infancy to never want anything they cannot have. On the other side the Savage — the one who has read Shakespeare, who chooses suffering, who will not take the pill. The book is unsubtle on purpose. Huxley wanted you to see the trade clearly.

The thesis I want to test is the obvious one. Modern Western life domesticates us into indoor cats. We are fed dopamine on demand — the screen, the snack, the algorithm that knows what we want before we do — and we get docile in the way indoor cats get docile. Soft, fed, bored, faintly anxious. The Savage chooses the harder option not because the hardness is good in itself, but because the hardness is what reveals the rest. Hunger reveals fullness. Cold reveals warmth. Solitude reveals what your own company is actually like when there is no audience.

The Savage chooses the harder option not because the hardness is good in itself, but because the hardness is what reveals the rest.

Christmas Eve in the bush, alone, has an honest texture I had forgotten. There is no one to perform for. There is no one to text. The day is whatever I make of it and most of it is uneventful in the way a day actually is when nobody is watching. I boiled water. I read for two hours. I stood in the rainwater shower for longer than was sensible because the water was warm from the afternoon sun and the air was warm from the rainforest and the combination is the kind of thing you cannot buy.

The shakedown verdict on the gear is overdue and unflattering. There is too much of it. The Tasmania trip will need a stripping-back — the second cooking pot, the hardback notebook I have not opened, the spare base layer, the second torch, the optimistic hammock. The Himalayan is a small bike and I have been packing it like a station wagon. By the end of the night the cull list runs to a page.

The riding admission is also overdue. Elephant turns — the slow, full-lock, dab-the-foot-down U-turn on dirt — are still bad. I practised one in a wet clearing near the camp and put the bike down at walking pace, in front of nobody, in a manner that would have been funny if it weren’t mine. I picked the bike up using the technique from the Stay Upright course — back to the seat, legs doing the work, lift in stages — and tried again, and was marginally less bad. That is the whole curve. Marginally less bad, repeated.

The soma is everywhere when you start looking. The infinite scroll. The sugar in everything. The constant audio companion in the ears of every person waiting for a bus. None of it is evil. All of it is engineered to keep the indoor cat indoors. Adventure motorcycling — slow, physical, uncomfortable, occasionally frightening — is a small protest against that engineering. Not a cure. A protest. The difference matters.

I do not think the Savage was right about everything. Huxley didn’t either. The point of the book is that both ends of the trade cost you something, and the conversation worth having is which costs you can live with. My answer for the night, and the trip, and probably the year, is that I would rather be cold and bored occasionally than warm and sedated permanently.

The fire went out around eleven. The rainforest got loud the way rainforest gets loud. The book stayed open on the deck. I slept badly and well at the same time.

A written companion to Episode 4: Why I chose the savage life on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel.